Poll: Did Miss Universe 2018 reduce Manila traffic this morning?

What was your experience like?

Dec 17, 2018

PHOTO: Jason Tulio

All right, guys, we need to clear something up.

Some of you are claiming that this morning’s Miss Universe telecast—wherein Catriona Gray beat out South Africa and Venezuela to earn the 2018 title—reduced Metro Manila road traffic to prime Pacquiao levels of emptiness. This includes one of our staff, who claims he had a ridiculously hassle-free commute as Gray made us proud on the world stage.

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But on the other hand, plenty of you say traffic remained unchanged, too. Check out the tweets below:

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We have a stalemate. And because anecdotal evidence isn’t exactly reliable, what we need for a real impression of what happened is some cold, hard data—data that the country’s leading ride-hailing provider, Grab, so kindly provided to us.

According to Grab, the booking rate this morning remained high while the number of allocations remained low (just 45%). Granted, the firm couldn’t provide us with anything more specific as those numbers are confidential, but what they did share with us paints pretty much the same picture we’ve had all throughout the holidays: plenty of cars on the road.

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Chances are none of the above is solid enough to put this issue to rest. Let’s just settle this via a good old-fashioned poll, then. So, how was your traffic situation this morning?